Is anyone else sad that we have adopted HTML/CSS as the universal lingua franca for describing views?
I understand why (or at least I believe I do): HTML/CSS is an inevitable part of the ecosystem because the web is an important target. A lot of devs will know at least some, and your organisation may already have loads of them because you also need to target the web. Maybe you even already have some view code written for the web platform that you want to re-use. This means that HTML/CSS gives you a head-start due to existing skillsets. It's familiar for some people and they can get going.
The problem is that it's bad. I say this as someone who comes from the outside, and isn't an expert ("barely competent" in HTML/CSS is probably accurate). Basic layout of things in a way that copes with different screen sizes/orientations is a surprisingly black art sometimes. There's a lot of history confusing the issue and three ways of doing each thing.
Coming at it fresh, it's a lot to learn to build a desktop/mobile UI. Flutter (for example) has its issues, but getting things to lay out correctly did not take a lot of learning. Once you've got the basics (3 days to a week for me, including learning Dart) things behaved predictably - it seems to take a lot of HTML/CSS knowledge before that is the case.
I understand why (or at least I believe I do): HTML/CSS is an inevitable part of the ecosystem because the web is an important target. A lot of devs will know at least some, and your organisation may already have loads of them because you also need to target the web. Maybe you even already have some view code written for the web platform that you want to re-use. This means that HTML/CSS gives you a head-start due to existing skillsets. It's familiar for some people and they can get going.
The problem is that it's bad. I say this as someone who comes from the outside, and isn't an expert ("barely competent" in HTML/CSS is probably accurate). Basic layout of things in a way that copes with different screen sizes/orientations is a surprisingly black art sometimes. There's a lot of history confusing the issue and three ways of doing each thing.
Coming at it fresh, it's a lot to learn to build a desktop/mobile UI. Flutter (for example) has its issues, but getting things to lay out correctly did not take a lot of learning. Once you've got the basics (3 days to a week for me, including learning Dart) things behaved predictably - it seems to take a lot of HTML/CSS knowledge before that is the case.